


Cover Me, Changing Lanes

by SC182



Series: Live Fast, Die Young (Bad Girls) [2]
Category: Fast and the Furious Series, The Fast and the Furious (2001)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Badass, Experimental Style, Female Character of Color, Multi, Pre-Slash, Prompt Fic, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 08:34:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/877798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SC182/pseuds/SC182
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Mexico, Mia doesn’t become a different person, just the person she’s always meant to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cover Me, Changing Lanes

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt from a mashup 100_prompts comm chart . Title and verse name taken from M.I.A.'s "[Bad Girls](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uYs0gJD-LE)".
> 
> Live Fast, Die Young (Bad Girls) Verse Summary: Toretto is responsible for the jackings, just not Dom. Basically, the verse where Mia is whip smart and absolutely badass.

Mia crosses the US-Mexican border on a Sunday afternoon and she isn’t alone. A laugh bubbles from her lips as she listens to a corny joke told by one of the guys from her study group that’s been flirting with her forthe past two semesters. Somehow, it’s remarkably easy to laugh despite her heart being lodged like a rusted nut in her throat.

She smiles back at him breezily, doing her best to fit in after she finally takes him and the rest up on their invitation to party down in Mexicali for the weekend. She’s not here to party but she can damn sure pretend that she is, at least for another twenty miles or so.

It's hot and loud inside the RV and even louder beyond the windows where lines of cars, dogs, and border patrol do their best to exercise patience in the face of federal security measures and all hope and pray for a number of reasons to get through the inspection quickly.

Knowing what they look like: a bunch of co-eds in someone or another’s parents’ RV, just makes them the ideal group for an on-board inspection. So Mia rolls with it all, plays cool and just slides into this new role and there’s no trace of the woman involved in a cross city chase with two members of a motorcycle gang and a love interest who stretched the limits of the definition of undercover.

Mia keeps laughing like she doesn’t have possibly two or possibly two and a half dead bodies attached to her, one of them being the copthat now fills her veins with ice water rather than the nascent fire of real passion. But she’s sure he survived fully intact. She just knows it.

So Mia listens and smiles and says a small prayer between each burst of inane chatter for the family she’s leaving behind. Dom, Vince, Leon, Jesse, and Letty…She blinks between each one and widens her grin until it’s almost painful,stretching from ear to ear.

Then it’s their turn. When they all submit their ids, she transitions to talking to Heather--one of her on-again-off-again classmates--about the fruity shade of orange that coats her nails. Mia doesn’t want to buy the color for herself but all of Heather’s hand waving causes the color blur in her field of vision much like the persistence of the Supra.

She can’t look at the color orange without thinking of Brian. Funny, it feels natural to associate him with blue because of those killer eyes and his mellow nature, but Mia can’t see orange without seeing still frames of memories frozen like snapshots in her head.

They’re all traveling with her—her family.

But Jesse, Brian and Letty stay with her the most.

 _Roadrunner,Roadrunner, ready to slow down_ , Mia hums when she’s hours deep into studying or working on some project or two. Those are Leon’s words for Jesse and the first thing she thinks of when he crosses her mind.

Mia believes in the contradiction of science and miracles. Jesse should be dead by all accounts—her dreams of him dying, her hands soaked in his blood and Dom trembling with rage and sorrow feel far too real. Just a bad dream, she reasons, when cold slithers up her spine like someone walking over her grave and she considers it may have happened in another time, in another life when Jesse is too wired to listen to her.

The day before her life in L.A. is shed like an old skin, Mia looks Jesse in the eyes while holding his shoulders like a vice clamp and gives him some honest truth that only a dear sister can. “You don’t owe _him_ anything.” Not the guy who was too busy ripping off cars and popping him over the head to realize Jesse’s brilliance. “Not one thing and don’t even try to give him anything. He’s not worth it.”

Jesse ever the dreamer holds out hope for a dad that’salways been deadbeat even when around. Somehow, Mia doesn’t know why, but her words are enough. Like her and Let bonding because they’re the two she-wolves in the pack; she and Jesse are the youngest, most coddled and misunderstood.They’ve always understood each other just fine.

There’s blood that day, just not his. Jesse listens to her but runs off with Dom. It’s Brian who chases her, playing hound to her fox through the streets and it’s Johnny Tran that she decisively excises from all future equations.

Mia takes the Charger because it’s not expected.

No, because she wants to get away.

No, because she can.

Brian slides in beside her at the red light ahead of the railroad tracks, she can see the disbelief and morbid curiosity clouding his face and Mia wishes that some lies could last forever.

“Mia, we can work this out,” Brian says from his car.

Laughing isn’t the right response. At all. But it makes her feel better, because he sounds like he’s trying to preserve their relationship rather than figuring out how he’s going to arrest her.

Her hair is loose and wild and shields her face like a curtain as she leans forward to rest her forehead on the wheel. He must mistake her laughter for crying, because Brian’s tone changes, softens and takes upthat pleading hitch from their previous car ride. “We can work this out—you, me, and Dom. We’ll--”

Wrong answer.

Mia shakes her head, tossing her hair back beyond her shoulder and issues him an indulgent grin. “No, Brian,” she states firmly,“there’s nothing to work out.” _Not between you, me, or my brother_ , Mia doesn’t say.

Owning what she’s done is something she’s accepted. Having her family finally see her for who she is everything she always wanted. Mia knows who she is, everyone else is just guessing.

“Mia…”

“Catch me if you can, Brian.” She challenges because Brian can never resist the thrill of competing. He’ll try to catch her, she knows he will, and he’ll fail. Losing isn’t a concept she explores often and today won’t be the day she starts, so she waits for the light and goes.

Brian Spilner or O’Conner or whoever rides in her periphery is meant to be the hero. The color of his hat is solid grey and Mia almost fears she’s miscalculated because he _almost_ has her before the tracks but she guns it to jump across and brakes hard when they’re over and lets him get the hit.

The Supra looks like a smoking piñata as she approaches the crumpled body. Brian wriggles inside, not entirely unscathed but alive. Mia helps him out and props him up against the side of the car.

She knows all about the Doppler Effect and the increasing volume of the police sirens urge her on.

Mia kisses Brian softly on the lips, just a small one that clearly says goodbye and slinks away backwards to the Charger. “Almost, Brian, almost,” she declares wistfully, because they almost manage to be so many wonderful things. “Tell Dom, I’ll explain it eventually, okay?”

One day, he’ll be better. He may even beat her. Until then, Mia takes her path and leaves Brian to his.

* * *

  
Until they cross the border in the RV, Mia will pretend that the hideous shade of citrus fruit is the hottest accessory of the season which she just has to have when they come back.

Her heart remains stuck in her throat and it’s all she can do to keep breathing and laughing.

And then they’re given the all-clear and slide under the radar of the patrol agents like as a couple of tittering co-eds should.

When they cross the border, she laughs and laughs, though the joke has long since passed.

It gets her a few funny looks, whatever, she’s free.

* * *

  
At the first rest stop, she’s off the RV.

When they ask where she’s going, because she quickly shies away from the promise of over-synthed party pop and shitty off-brand beer, Miasays, “Gotta handle some personal business. I’ll catch up with you later.”

Later never comes and the personal business she has to handle is the matter of her continued freedom.

* * *

  
The moment Mia realizes that she’d already planned for this causes her stop her work—homework as per usual—set her pen down and glance around at the new life she’s given herself.

In Mexicali, it’s just a quick matter of reshuffling her mental lists and making the connections to get her set. Mia keeps a running list of the things she has to acquire for this new phase: ids, fake name, a car, school, a place to live, a story...

For how long, she never fully clarifies, even to herself. Just plows ahead and sets up her newlife as a visiting exchange student who despite appearances is a total gringa. It’s easier to not speak Spanish than to reveal that her words don't carry the Mexican-Central American drawl that's common to this part of the word.  Instead, her speech cultivated by her parents and not often seen relatives is fast clipped and saturated in rolling inflections and wide vowels straight from the heart of the Caribbean.

It takes her an afternoon to get an id and a place to stay, a day for the car and put enough of herself under the hood to make it everything she needs, and two days to get back into school with the help of an extra expensive knockoff student visa and a schedule that will see her actually graduating a semester early.

The people she meets and adopts as her own don’t call her Mia. That’s not who she is to them. Her name now doesn’t matter, but her past does, like her dreams that replay heavy and booming in quiet moments and galvanize her to action and planning and a constant state of thinking; Mia is free.

In less than a week, Mia Toretto goes from someone else’s shadow to a wanted ghost to the lady of the winds, offering redemption to noone but herself.

* * *

  
She ditches the open space and sun of Mexicali for Mexico City’s blanketed heat, smog, and skyscrapers. Then she’s another student awash in the lights and busy streets that feel like L.A. but older and twice as packed and tense like the old gods’ jaws ready to snap shut and devour her if she proves unworthy.

Mia tries to keep her head down, just swim along; pretending to be who everyone thinks she is. But the signs are everywhere, literally, everywhere, enticing to her and pulling her back to the calling in her blood. Going to a dig is like going home and she half-expects to see Dom holding court when she gets there.

She hasn’t heard Letty’s actual voice in a couple of months but she can hear her in her thoughts all the time and when the signs like discrete Easter eggs continue to catch her eye, Let’s ghost asks, “ You scared?” Her lips curl around the question shiny and lush and Mia feels a spark in her gut.

Mia thinks, _no_.

“Then,” Let’s voice hisses low, switching on all those parts that Mia’s tried to suppress, “test it, genius. See it for yourself: are you flash or fire.” She shivers, because this apparition of Let that follows her is right and even if it’s a warped memory—some failed fantasy, it speaks a truth that Mia cannot deny.

One Saturday night, three months after starting over, Mia slips through the crowd in her black bodied and silver paneled Civic and makes a wager before rolling to the starting line. She kills her music to listen to the soft kittenish purr of her engine and indirectly smiles at the bad pick-up lines being hurled at her from all directions. She knows which ones have her outright beat in horsepower and torque, but that’s just a small deficiency. Mia has three things that none of the others have and it doesn’t come from the injection of a chemical into her engine. She’s got less drag, a naturally sharpeye, and knowledge that the one who blinks last is always the winner.

Let’s voice hums with the engine as she gooses the gas. There’s no reason to turn her head to stare at the empty seat. Mia doesn’t need to see Letty to know that she’ll always have her back.

The flagger steps between the cars, making a show of eyeing each one of them until he gets to her and then blows her a dramatic air kiss. Overt jackass or not, he’s not her type and definitely not the cause of her smile growing sharper.

“¿Listo? _Ready._ He asks and the engines harmonize in reply.

She knows how she looks: like a girl who can’t take a little dirt under her fingernails and wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between superglue and a supercharger. She can and will. Those lists from before stretch and wind out onto the street and become tangible enough for her envision the course in her head.

“Born ready,” she assures herself.

And Letty’s ghost agrees and smirks from the corner of hereye, “Then show’em how we raise hell.”

The flag drops.

Ever the sleeper, she’s harder to catch than the wind.

* * *

  
She thinks about calling Dom sometimes. She thinks about Let, Vince, and Jesse. But Dom’s voice is the one she needs to hear.

* * *

  
An accident brings her back to before, but it’s not hers though.

A friend of a friend gets ripped off by a pack of thieves—eerily similar to her previous hobby—they jack and run after making their victims run flats in isolated corners of the roads leading away to the small pueblos radiating beyond the city. Mia’s not _really_ listening but hears enough to trigger another cascade of thoughts to press forward. One thought becomes two and two becomes a vague plan. It’s a known fact that every thief has something to hide. She does. When thieves hide, they big, so she thinks and ties her ideas together into an actualized procedure and finally offers off-handedly, "How about this? Your cars and some high tensile cable and--" And lays it all out.

Mia will take them fishing without any of them getting wet.

* * *

  
Two months after sharing her advice and seven months inMexico, her new name has a network of clients who come looking to her for ideas. Legal or illegal, she doesn't ask questions.

When she counts her money for the first time instead of writing it in her ledger or rolling the mental figures, she's got enough figures to pay for several private college tuitions. Being selfish has never been Mia’s problem. It’s her ambition that gets her. She has to share her fortune. So she finally gets the nerve to call her brother.

* * *

  
The first thing Dom does isn't try to convince her to come home. That's the third thing actually. The second thing is trying to get her to tell him where she is. The first thing is him bitching about the Charger. Her brother, his priorities, like always make her smile.

“Miss you, too, D.”

She almost feels like her old self.

“Mia Bella,” he sighs, longsuffering but happy, and it sounds like home.

* * *

  
In Mexico, Mia doesn’t become a different person, just the person she’s always meant to be.


End file.
